The mayor of Florence has denied that the Renaissance city is a hotbed of "bunga
bunga", amid a growing scandal involving prostitutes being paid for sex
by council officials and other local worthies.

The scandal in the city of Dante and the Medicis has invited comparisons with parties organised by Silvio Berlusconi, who was this week sentenced to seven years in jail after being found guilty of paying for sex with an under age prostitute.

After following Mr Berlusconi's escapades avidly, like the rest of Italy, Florentines now have a sex scandal on their own doorstep.

Prosecutors are investigating an alleged network of 142 prostitutes, many of them from Eastern Europe, who were allegedly paid for sex by council officials and businessmen in two of the city's smart hotels.

Fourteen people are being investigated for procuring prostitutes on the basis of 4,000 pages of telephone calls intercepted by the police.

Sexual encounters also allegedly went on in council offices – on one occasion last year a cleaning lady allegedly walked in on an official in flagrante with a prostitute, a 42-year-old Romanian identified only as Adriana.

The investigation, code-named "Bella vita" or "Beautiful life" by prosecutors, found that she had been given a free council-owned flat to live in, and also received clients there.

Matteo Renzi, Florence's centre-Left mayor and a former boy scout who is tipped as a future Italian prime minister, said even though the scandal has touched his administration, it is nowhere near as salacious as the ones that engulfed Mr Berlusconi and that in any case he has a duty to defend the image of his city.

"(The scandal) cannot be portrayed as bunga bunga in Palazzo Vecchio," declared Mr Renzi, 38, referring to the crenellated, 13th-century town hall which is the seat of the council.

The mayor, a practising Catholic, was responding not just to the reports of the prostitute scandal, but also to more specific criticism from Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, the archbishop of Florence, who recently portrayed the Tuscan city as a den of iniquity.

The archbishop, 66, said gambling and cocaine use was rife, along with moral "transgressions", a remark which was interpreted as a reference to the sex scandal.

"I don't see my city as being in the grip of moral decline," Mr Renzi responded to a radio station.

The image painted by the archbishop was of "a city laid waste, with homeless people everywhere, sex scandals wherever you look, cocaine all over the place. These are real problems and we need to crack down on gambling and prostitution. But I don't think Florence is a city dedicated to moral degradation."